Africa

Introduction

Over the past several generations, Africa, once so illusive and unexplored it was named “The Dark Continent,” has morphed into the region most severely plagued by genocidal civil wars, poverty, disease, over population, and environmental disasters. Africa is ground zero, the major battlefield in the strategy to utilize ICTs on the front lines against these devastating handicaps.

Afri-stats
There are currently 905,954,600 living in Africa. Between 2002 and 2004, Internet usage increased 123.6.%, from 4,514,400 to 10,095,200. Even with this increase , only 1.1% of the nation is online. The countries with the fewest Internet users are the Congo and Liberia (0.02%), Ethiopia and Niger (0.1%), Nigeria and Rwanda (0.5%). In comparison, 6.5% of South Africans are online.

Africa Gross National Income provides information on income statistics per capita in various African countries.

Sub-Saharan Africa

In 2000, the World Education Forum (WEF) and the Digital Opportunity Task (DOT) Force identified Sub-Saharan Africa as the region most in need of assistance from newly formed cooperatives tasked with turning on the lights. NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa's Development was one of the key organizations involved in the WSIS development of ITC in Africa.

"A Framework for Action in Sub-Saharan Africa: Education for African Renaissance in the Twenty-first Century" presented at the forum, provided an overview of the achievements and shortcomings of the region's educational infrastructure and identified the following issues as vital to the region's meeting the goals of Education for all by 2015:

• accelerated access, with particular reference to policies of equity and female enrolment, including affirmative action;
• community involvement in school decision-making and administration;
• employment of teachers in their own community of origin;
• curriculum reform toward locally relevant subjects;
• affordable teaching materials and textbooks;
• use of mother tongue as the language of instruction;
• the use of schools as community learning centres;
• evaluation based on an action-research-action paradigm;
• management/statistical information systems in planning, evaluation, etc.

At the ITU Telecom Africa 2004 (Cairo, Egypt, May 4-8, 2004) key stakeholders in the "Access Africa" campaign reported on their progress and identified problem areas, all in preparation for the 2005 WSIS second phase meeting in Tunis.

The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog posts up-to-the-minute news from conferences relative to the global digital divide.

Highway Africa News Agency (HANA)Same day reporting from WSIS related meetings on The Road to Tunis. HANA's coverage begins with the 2003 meeting in Geneva.

The Worldwide Blogging Adventure of Andy Carvin Follow Andy Carvin on the Road to Tunis. Andy, program director for the EDC Center for Media & Community and administrator of the Digital Divide listserv, attended ITU Africa, the Telecities conference in Sweden, CTCNet in Seattle and the World Summit on the Information Society Preparatory Meeting in Tunisia.

WSIS Profile: African Virtual University

Perhaps the most successful organization in promoting ICTs , the African Virtual University (AVU) is a profile of success in challenging the digital divide in Africa. AVU provides access to educational opportunities for students and teachers in remote regions by connecting them with outstanding online distance education. Learning centers, situated on local university campuses, utilize satellite technology, the Internet, and ICTs, enabling students to interact with professors from Canada, Europe, and the United States. Content is matched to the individual needs of the learner.

An excerpt from the WSIS case study on AVU:

With a digital library of over 1,000 full text journals and a variety of other academic materials, more than 45,000 e-mail accounts and a website that receives approximately one million hits per month, the AVU has become an exemplary example of educational training in Africa.  According to writer for Time Magazine, “This is perhaps the most promising example of how information technology can promote advancement.  The AVU links 25 African campuses to classrooms and libraries worldwide.”  By working with world-renowned professors from the developed and developing world, the AVU is preparing a new generation of knowledge producers on a continent that has historically been marginalized in the global community.  By working with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States to provide students with practical and timely IT skills, the era of marginalization might soon be a thing of the past for many Africans.

Initially a World Bank project, AVU now partners with NEPAD and Commonwealth of Learning and is supported by the African Development Bank (AfDB). AVU is dedicated to achieving the Millennium Development Goals as well as the goals of the Dakar Framework of Action.

Africa General

ICT Update: Telecenters Africa

Information on telecenters throughout Africa

Bisharat

Championing the need to utilize maternal languages in models of sustainable development and ICTs, Bisharat provides information on African language resources, including encoding, keyboards, and machine translations and African languages. The project also provides access to documents on African language policy. (English, French, Portuguese, Hausa)

Ghana Information Knowledge Network

GINKS is an online database of Ghana's numerous ICT resources. Articles, project profiles. GINKS is also dedicated to knowledge sharing and networking

AllAfrica.com

The largest online distributor of news about Africa provides multi-media content and develops systems technology. Searchable by regions/countries and topics.

AfriAfya

AfriAfya is engaged in utilizing ICTS to address the lack of telephone connectivity in Africa, applying the power of ICTs to address health issues at the community level. Operating from a bottom up as well as a top down model, their goal is to involve community members in knowledge transfer. The Mtaa Dispensary, one of their projects, is overseen by the rural government, The population is plagued with socio-economic and health concerns and isolated from the nearest communities with no telephones, no electricity, no running water, and access roads that become impassible during rainy seasons. An information system, using chalk and pin boards, and numerous graphs assist visitors as they navigate their way through the dispensary. A new ICT development system will allow villagers to collect, process, store and print out information to assist them in accessing information on health topics.

Africa and Internet Governance

Internet Governance: Defend Free Flow of Information.

The growth, integrity and popularity of the Internet depends on its independence from international organizations and governments.

AfriNIC

Free At Last! With the launch of the African Network Information Center, Africa will assume control of its website addresses. Currently, African countries pay fees to the US or Europe for owning website names. The network aims to increase Internet growth throughout the continent and to provide an opportunity for freedom in content development to participating agencies, individuals, companies. (French, Arabic, Portuguese, English)

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